Super Mario for dark people

When I was a dark child, it was difficult to find ways in which I felt I could relate. As I get older, it becomes a little easier to accept this; but it is a continuous struggle.

In video games, this has always been a bit tricky. One of the games that captured my imagination (as most people did) was Super Mario 3 for the NES. I remember that the game excited me but it also scared me a bit (Why was the sun so angry with me?). His style made sense to my childish mind, but more importantly, it didn’t exclude me as an Asian kid. I think this is due to two things. First, the limited pixel graphics meant it was difficult to capture skin colors, so most of the characters were generically white. While this has some obvious implications (Eurocentric), it actually meant that the skin color was reduced to a few pixels. Mario was white and European, did it matter? No. Was it really Italian? I guess it was. But the point is, this was not really a representation of the struggles of an Italian plumber. This was fun. There was a goal to reach, and I just had to do it against the backdrop of some fantastic graphics. Mario and Luigi were such inflated stereotypes that it was hard to take them seriously. When he played as Mario, he was Mario.

Second, as a Japanese game (which I didn’t really think about at the time) all the referents were aliens in the west. It was not a completely “white” world because culturally speaking not all the referents were in the West. Tanooki outfits? Goombas? It didn’t mean anything to us, it just looked great and meant that as a dark child I didn’t feel left out. In fact, I felt very much a part of this fantasy world and was glad to spend hours searching for secrets (and I still do!).

In reality, the final irony of video games is that since the graphics in games are now more “realistic”, they end up reproducing discriminations from the real world. I’m much more likely to come across stereotypes of brown people in Full HD video games than when I was a kid (not to say there were none in the pixel period). This is a real shame, and I think that as games try to capture the feel of a “Hollywood” movie (for higher profits), they will simply duplicate the same troublesome topics that cinema has been criticized for.

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